‘We’ve got another bottle, haven’t we, dear?’
Søren and Erik got on like a house on fire, mainly because they were both in need of a plausible social situation in which to drink.
Twenty minutes later the bottle was empty. Søren obligingly offered to go down to the shop with Erik’s money and was back with a carrier bag full of cans before we had even blinked. Clara stuck to tea with ginger and lemon in it, and it wasn’t the first time she had heard Erik Brinch go on about Drop-Inn in the seventies; Stangerup, Peter Hjorth, the advertising man, and Per Arnoldi. Literary discussions that degenerated into fist fights, whisky drunk by the barrel, women picked up on the way home.
‘Don’t forget we’re going to the theatre tonight,’ said Clara.
‘Oh, Christ. Do we have to, dear?’
‘Bølle’s left us some tickets on the door, Erik.’
‘Can’t we go out for dinner instead?’ he said, meaning drink.
‘I hate theatre,’ said Søren.
‘Me too!’ said Erik Brinch. ‘What a jaded art form it is!’
‘The way they ponce about,’ said Søren. ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me!’
Clara put a carrier bag on the table with the meat in it that was now thawed.
‘We fucked the women’s movement out of them,’ said Erik Brinch.
Now he couldn’t be dragged from his orgies in the seventies, and Clara left him to it. She has always been inclined to jealousy, but in the case of Erik Brinch it was all backdated.
‘The Red Stockings were horrible!’ said Søren. ‘Long boots, lipstick, short skirts and nylon stockings, that’s what women should look like!’
Erik guffawed and opened three beers.
‘All the hippy guys sat on the floor talking about their feelings,’ he said. ‘We buggered off with their girlfriends. I mean, they wanted a proper man, didn’t they? With a bulge in his pants. Skirts up and mind the doors, sister!’
We had to get a taxi and made it wait outside while we dropped the meat off at Camilla White Wine’s. She had wriggled herself into something romantic, off-white with little purple flowers.
‘Don’t be long, now,’ she said.
The art dealer on Gothersgade was getting ready to close as we came bursting through the door. Søren put the picture down on the counter.
‘Yes,’ said the art dealer. ‘Hm…’
‘There’s a little gem for you, eh?’ said Søren.
‘Is it a work of which you’re fond?’ said the art dealer.
‘It’s a good picture,’ said Søren. ‘Anyone can see that.’
‘Because if you are fond of it, I would suggest you take it home with you and put it back on the wall.’
‘Thanks, but I’m here to sell it.’
‘I can’t give you much, I’m afraid,’ said the art dealer.
‘It’s a genuine bloody Appelgreen,’ said Søren, indicating the pencilled signature in the corner.
‘It’s a lithograph, and as you can see it’s number eleven of one hundred and fifty. Ole Appelgreen is a fine painter, that far I agree with you, but I’m afraid it’s not quite sufficient on its own.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘His work isn’t in demand at the moment.’
‘You mean I should have brought you a turd on a stick?’
The man was about to lose his patience, but thought better of it.
‘Okay, let’s cut the crap. How much will you give us for it?’
‘Five hundred,’ said the art dealer.
‘You must be mad!’
We left with the five hundred kroner and the bottle of aquavit Søren had noticed on a shelf. He was utterly miserable.
‘Let’s get back to Camilla White Wine,’ I said.
‘I can’t be arsed now.’
‘What are you going to do instead?’
‘Sort out some business on the street.’
‘What about your heating bill?’
‘What about it?’
Jan Minetti lived in the next-door studio and was Diana’s best friend. Though he had moved to Copenhagen twenty-five years before, his Jutland dialect remained intact. He was plump, in the way of a silent movie star, with black curly hair tumbling down his forehead which he constantly brushed away from his moist, puppy-dog eyes. If anyone was an artist, he was, and his big oil canvases depicted mechanically perceived intestines in distorted colours and would have been original had Francis Bacon decided on a career in bookkeeping. Jan wasn’t represented by Galleri Wallner, Claus Andersen, Nils Stærk, V1 or Galleri Moritz, but by a gallerist up three steps on Smallegade. He was the son of Vejle’s first pizza baker and insisted he was a wop, not an Italian.
‘We’re the only ones left in Copenhagen,’ he said, sweeping his hand out across the city’s rooftops. We were seated on his eighty-square-metre rooftop terrace, all little plateaus and exotic plants. ‘Everyone’s moved to Berlin. Tal R doesn’t even want a Danish gallery.’
‘I don’t like Germans,’ said Diana. ‘They smell of cheap soap.’
‘You’re just scared you won’t hack it there!’ Jan said.
‘And you’ve got nothing to lose,’ said Diana.
‘Delightful, isn’t she?’
We had dinner at Jan’s place every evening; his food was good and displayed variety with a minimum of components. Tonight had been grilled pork chops, green lentils with rosemary and halved bulbs of fennel braised in water, butter, oil and garlic. As usual, Diana had paid for everything. That same afternoon I had been leafing through an art book in her studio and had come across Carl André, the minimalist American artist whose most familiar work, one hundred and twenty bricks stacked two high in a neat rectangle, became the object of one of those debates all art historians depise when it was purchased by the Tate with British taxpayers’ money in 1974.
‘What do you think of Carl André?’ I said.
‘I adore him,’ said Diana. ‘His work is so fine and expressive.’
‘He’s a poor bricklayer,’ said Jan.
‘Let’s take a hypothetical example,’ I said. ‘A Swiss collector buys a work by Carl André and wants it installed in his home. A carrier arrives with two big packing cases, and when the collector opens them all he sees is ordinary bricks. How can he be sure it’s art?’
‘He has the artist install it,’ said Diana.
‘That sort of thing makes me embarrassed to be an artist,’ said Jan. ‘What’s the point of art questioning art? Can bricks be art? No, they can’t. They can be bricks, in fact they’re very good at it. Art should be about expanding horizons, not narrowing things down to some pointless discussion among a tiny elite. Do you know what Carl André’s art begets? Jobs for dried-up fannies who have spent six years reading art history, that’s what!’
‘As I understand it, the work at the Tate was a hundred and twenty ordinary bricks,’ I said. ‘And what makes them art is that they are chosen by the artist.’
‘No, the idea is the point,’ said Diana.
‘There is no such thing as good or bad art,’ I said. ‘There are people who are artists, trained or otherwise, and what they do is by definition art, and it’s up to us to make of it what we will. Is that it?’
‘Definitely,’ said Diana. ‘That’s got to be it.’
‘I miss Harlequin!’ said Jan. ‘Can’t we go to the Tivoli Gardens soon?’
The longing I felt for a woman when she was asleep tended to disappear once she had opened her eyes, but with Diana it was different. I liked her better awake. She woke up and immediately embraced whatever reality was at hand. She had nothing resembling a standard routine.
We ate smoked cheese and radishes, and outside it was Sunday.
‘I love the way we are,’ she said.
‘It’s like a dream,’ I said.
‘But you’re real,’ she said. ‘I’m real, and everything is happening.’
I made juice out of beetroot, chilli, lemon and ginger.
‘Do
you think it can go on like this?’ she said.
‘I want it to, in every way,’ I said.
‘But you know what I’m like,’ she said.
‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Should we go to church?’
I had always taken a romantic view of church and faith. I can’t remember having heard the word God at any point in my upbringing, save perhaps for sentences such as: ‘Oh God, we forgot to get wine in!’ Church was then as now considered oppressive and viewed with ridicule by the intellectual left, and the protest generation of the sixties managed successfully to undermine all notion of faith that might have been held by the Danes, a fact that had to be lamented inasmuch as the epic narratives and profound thinking of religious faith enrich the spiritual constitution of any nation’s people. Fundamentally, though, I acknowledged that one either had faith or had not, and I was unable, no matter how much I would have liked, to believe with anything other than my intellect, and at best only from time to time.
The church we entered looked like so many others: high, white walls, exhortative words painted on wood, a three-piece choir of disharmonious constitution and an organist who was only occasionally in contact with the melody. The pastor was called Andreas Møller. He was in his mid-thirties, with shoulder-length hair and a carroty full beard. He would have been hard to caricature, possessing no special characteristics beyond his ordinary appearance and Danish blue eyes.
‘I’ve seen him somewhere before,’ said Diana.
His sermon was about purgatory and he related the parable of the rich man who enjoyed life to the full and neglected to give food to the poor beggar at the gate.
One day the rich man died and found himself in the kingdom of the dead with a terrible thirst. From far away he could see the poor beggar receiving comfort in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man asked Abraham to send the beggar to him with water, but Abraham declined, and the rich man realised he was doomed to agony. He then asked Abraham to send the beggar, that his five brothers might be converted to the faith, but Abraham replied that if the rich man’s brothers did not listen to the Prophets they would not be convinced even by someone rising from the dead.
‘Is Hell a hole that gapes beneath us?’ said Andreas Møller. ‘Is there a Devil with a trident in his hand? No, Hell is right here, and it begins with the uncivil comment we make to the bus driver. Hell is having no time for others. It leads to bitterness, and we end up lonely and joyless, calling the police when the neighbours have a party. Ought God to save those who are on their way to Hell? Ought He to allow them to begin anew? That’s what Jesus did for us. God does nothing! He leaves them alone.’
I shook his hand on the way out. He was mild and smiling.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come over to the parish hall and have a coffee?’
There was a poster of a local football team on the wall, and a couple of toothless old men sat drinking beer in a corner. The coffee was remarkably good, and later I discovered the beans were from Ricco’s coffee bar. Andreas Møller flitted from table to table and seemed to be in the midst of ongoing conversation with most of those present. He listened patiently to people’s problems concerning drink, illness and loneliness. Coffee went on for an hour. ‘You’re not in a hurry, are you?’ said Andreas. ‘I’d like to show you something. Five minutes!’
He came back looking like someone who was into Prefab Sprout. Short jacket in soft calfskin, charcoal-grey trousers and brown Playboy shoes.
He took us to his apartment, which was diagonally opposite Al-Diwan on Vesterbrogade. ‘This is where Handelsbanken’s directors used to install their mistresses,’ he said. The ceilings were four and a half metres high and decorated with some exceptional stucco. He led us through three enormous rooms, opening the double doors wide into a fourth before turning on the light by an old porcelain switch and looking up. Diana’s tapestry of a man with semen in his beard.
‘I knew I’d seen you before,’ she said.
‘I was going through a strange time when I bought your tapestry. I was rather unstable and I’d shaved my head completely. Are you hungry?’
He proceeded to concoct a curry from scratch, allowing the finely chopped onions to simmer in ghee, roasting the spices in the pan and crushing them in a mortar together with garlic and fresh ginger. The aromas filled the room.
‘That was a harsh sermon,’ I said.
‘You have to make an example,’ he said. ‘We’ve got enough pop stars who’ve been on a yoga retreat to Kerala and found God in a stone they tripped up on. What would you like to drink? Riesling?’
He took a Battenfeld-Spanier out of the fridge.
‘How come you can afford to live here on a pastor’s salary?’ Diana asked.
‘The building belongs to me,’ he said. ‘My father bought it back in the seventies. He was a solicitor here in the Vesterbro district, his clients were all the smuggler kings and pimps of the day, and when they fell on hard times he bought up their properties.’
‘So you’re a true Vesterbro lad, then?’ I said.
‘Well, I grew up on Sønder Boulevard, but when I was eleven we moved to Hørsholm and my father gave vent to all his social ambitions and sent me to board at Herlufsholm.’
‘Which you weren’t happy about?’ I said.
‘The standard was appalling. They couldn’t even sing their ABC in Year 6.’
His tiger prawn curry had the kind of intensity and multiple layers of taste found only in Indian restaurants in London.
‘So, what made you go to church today?’ he asked us.
‘I grew up with it,’ said Diana.
Andreas Møller had difficulty looking Diana in the eye. He addressed me, but was focused on her.
‘What do you think, Mikkel?’ he said.
‘I think we’re entering a new age,’ I said.
‘Aha! What kind of a new age?’
I told him my ideas about big community and how I believed love could be found outside coupledom, and though he seemed mightily surprised that I should be preoccupied by such matters, he listened attentively, something I suspected he didn’t do very often.
‘Have you heard of John Noyes?’ he said, immediately disappearing into his library and returning with two books: Without Sin by Spencer Klaw and The Man Who Would Be Perfect by Robert D. Thomas.
We decided to go for a drink at Café 42, and as we walked along Oehlenschlägersgade, Andreas told us about the Oneida Community, an alternative society founded amid the piety of the Victorian age. John Noyes came from a religious home in Vermont and studied theology at Yale, but found it hard to come to terms with the restrictive values of the age: man sinned, found redemption and sinned again, and to John Noyes this seemed both illogical and lax. Jesus bore our sins on the cross, and Noyes considered that by bearing Jesus truly in our hearts and serving God to the best of our ability man would be eternally freed from sin.
Noyes married into wealth, his new wife sympathising strongly with his ideas, and together they founded a small movement that under Noyes’ direction was to carry out his radical blend of Christian revival, socialism and free sex. Noyes believed God had given man the gift of sexual pleasure in order that he should exploit it to perfection, which in Noyes’ conviction could not occur within the confines of monogamous marriage.
In 1848 he and thirty adherents moved to the state of New York, to the former Indian reservation Oneida, where they built the Mansion House, a huge complex comprising a very large number of bedrooms. By the time construction was completed, the movement had swelled to some two hundred members and its rules were as entrenched as they were simple. All women and men were in principle married to each other and exclusive relationships were not allowed. If, during work in the field, one met a person to whom one was attracted, permission to act on this desire had to be sought from Noyes, and if he deemed the applicant to be feeble in mind or uncommitted to the community, the application was r
ejected.
Coitus reservatus was obligatory, men were not permitted to ejaculate inside their partner, primarily because pregnancy rendered women unable to work. Work was central to the community and, like sex, it should be enjoyed, which meant frequent job rotations in order to avoid the monotony of routine.
He set up a nursery school so that women could return to work as soon as they stopped breastfeeding. Women were uniformly clad in functional short skirts, and all wore their hair short.
In frequent lectures given in the main hall, Noyes encouraged diligence and high moral standards, and placed the community before the individual. He was opposed to competition, believing that man was better served enjoying life to the full rather than competing with others.
The most academically promising youngsters were sent to Yale to be educated for the good of the community. At its peak, Oneida comprised three hundred and six residents.
As the 1870s drew to a close, Noyes passed on leadership to his son, who lacked his father’s charisma. The community gradually dissolved after some thirty years.
I’d been listening raptly to Andreas Møller’s story, but Diana looked vacant and said she wanted to go home and draw. Andreas Møller took her hand as she said goodbye, but could find nothing to say. We ordered safari suits.
‘John Noyes sounds like he was a bit of a dictator,’ I said.
‘No. He was omnipotent, but the supreme authority rested in group criticism meetings. Aggravations were nipped in the bud, and problems were addressed by the assembly.’
Andreas Møller enjoyed my full attention, but although I was fascinated by his stories of Oneida, there was an odd lack of warmth between us. I was certain this came from him and it could have just been a simple lack of chemistry, but it felt more like distrust to me.
‘My father used to wear an Ascot, too,’ he said, and I had no idea what he was talking about until he indicated my silk cravat.
‘Is it called an Ascot?’ I said.
‘You know full well it is, Vallin.’
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